Yet, a more wonderful thing remains than the fame of Blenheim and Waterloo, and the actual existence of an English monarch—the fact that some are found in the present day to argue for the enforcement of this tyranny on a single class, when all other classes have long been relieved from it; to argue about the navy as their forefathers argued about the army;—that Britannia will no more rule the waves,—that there will be no more glory in a sailor-king, no more hope for a maritime people, when impressment is done away. Why so? If the service is pleasant and profitable,—as those maintain who see little hardship in impressment,—there is no need of compulsion to make men enter it,—even on the briefest emergency,—to judge by the universal readiness to embrace what is honourable and profitable. If the service be not thus desirable, why it is not? That smugglers and felons should be delivered over to the king’s officers, with the admission that five years’ service is a prodigious punishment for their crimes; that the wages of the king’s service are low, at the same time that the wages of merchant vessels are raised exorbitantly by the practice of impressment; that the king’s pressed seamen are sometimes paid once in five, ten, or fifteen years, while in the merchant service the payment is regular; that the enforced service may be perpetual, while all other service has a defined limit,—all this is surely no necessary part of naval management, while it fully accounts for the supposed necessity of getting men by force, because they cannot be had in any other way. All this fully accounts for seamen dispersing before a press-gang, like a flock of birds from beneath a hawk; it accounts for their changing their names, dressing in smock frocks, hiding under beds, and in lofts and closets; but it shames the attempted justification of impressment. When the trial has been made of the usual means of rendering this service as desirable as any other, (and its natural charms are great;) when the attempt has been made to train up, in time of peace, a supply of seamen to carry on a war, there may be ground for argument as to whether impressment be or be not necessary. It is wholly an experimental question, and has as yet been argued only _à priori_. It is too serious a matter to subject to injury men’s lives and characters and fortunes, the happiness or existence of their families, and the industry of a considerable portion of society, through adherence to a false mode of argumentation, and to modes of procedure too well suited to a former barbarous age to be congenial with the present. The more willingly and extensively society is freed from ancient restraints on its freedom and industry, the more conspicuously stands out, monstrous in its iniquity, the practice of the impressment of seamen. CHAPTER V. NOTHING BUT A VOICE.